(updated) $4 (now $40) Triple XM-L Dive Light Review - with teardown pics

LED Flashlights – General Info 18650 Flashlights
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Well, I thought I’d give the OP some time to get his own second light, take it apart, and share the pics as part of his review. :wink: But, if keltex78 doesn’t get his apart soon, and wants me to share pics, I’ll do that. I know we all like pics, but if anyone joins this thread late, it will be easier for them to find pics in the OP than to have to scroll through to find them in here. That’s the way I think, anyway. I guess I could be wrong.

On a side note: If you have one of these and want to see what’s inside - it’s really easy to get it apart without damaging anything, and you’ll see more than you can in a picture. If you don’t have one of these, let me go ahead and save you the trouble. Any number of pictures won’t help this thing be worth the $40 current price. I’d say $20 at best. In fact, I just yesterday received in the mail a couple of 2 X 26650 lights I bought from eBay for less than $15 each. They are no-name zoomies just like a million others on eBay, and their quality is much better than the quality of these lights.

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+1! Post away! The more content that can be provided makes the thread more valuable...

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Yeah, but you paid over THREE times as much! :bigsmile: Just kidding of course and thanks for all your input.

I still say, (if you were lucky enough to get one), for $4.00 including shipping, these are an incredible bargain.

We are so lucky to be now living in a world of “Chinese flashlight junk” heaven!

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The second one finally came in; this time in a proper cardboard shipping box instead of the typical plastic bag.

The second light worked the same as the first but had a couple of minor issues, so I've delegated this into the "Tear-down" light. First, we had a couple of off center emitters, and a broken centering ring (more later ).

Bezel, Thick O-Ring, Thick Glass lens, Thin O-Ring and a flimsy spring clip (not sure of it's purpose, it fits around the pill, but there isn't anything for it to seat against when the pill is installed on the light):

The beveled glass lens IS THICK! It measure 5+mm by ~38mm dia.

After removing the bezel, O-rings, lens, etc, I find a pill that has been roughly chiseled down to align within the body:

Here's a closeup of the driver; there's a couple of ICs and what appears to be a diode under the coil. I see the two parallel R150 resistors; is this thing resistor modable?

Inside the pill: it's a decent thick-walled aluminum drop-in design. There is some contact to the body at the base, where it rests against the flat edges. Some thermal compound may help heat transfer here. There is a minimal gap between the sides of the pill and the sides of the body; When I re-assemble the light, I'll be using some aluminum strips to fill the gap, which should help heat-sinking a lot. You could fill it with a silicone adhesive, JB Weld, or other compound, which should help, but that would prevent future disassembly.

Remember the broken centering ring? Well, here's the reason: They have been cut from the factory to allow clearance for the wires! I definitely feel for the sweat shop working who is cutting those rings and hand-fitting each one on the assembly line.

I also notice that the emitters are wired in parallel. The PCB is a 29mm aluminum board; I don't think I'll have much success finding an aftermarket XP-sized replacement, allowing me to use this for the UV triple host as I had intended. I think I have several small-diameter XP-sized PCBs I had ordered from FastTech though; Maybe I could fit three onto the pill with minimal fuss.

Under the PCB, an insufficient glob of cheap white CPU Heat Sink compound. Also, there's a burr or other unevenness to the surface, so the board isn't sitting quite level to make good thermal contact.

It's fairly cheaply made on the inside, but there may be some potential. My two big questions are:

  1. Can this be resistor modded (after improving the host/pill thermal connection) to boost output?
  2. Are there aftermarket triple emitter PCBs in this size to allow emitter replacements?
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Nice job on the images!

I don’t understand how the emitters are wired. Wouldn’t more wires be required for the third emitter to be in parallel? Clearly the connections are a combination of wires and traces, and I can’t see the traces. I’m also puzzled why the original design of the MCPCB would have 2 + and 2 - solder pads for 3 emitters. Perhaps to give some flexibility in connecting the red/blue wires regardless of which way they happen to route through the bottom? (in which case the white wires should be unnecessary). One theory is that the white wires are needed to bypass traces that are broken by the hole drilled in the centre of the MCPCB to make space for the screw. I guess what I’m saying is that I can’t tell if it’s a series or parallel design, but I’m sure it makes sense to someone seeing the traces.

I wonder which driver component is the magnetic switch. Does “1382” line up with the external switch?

It seems the flimsy spring clip is a bit of a mystery about whether it makes electric contact or not.

I’m still waiting for my light, and I’ll be looking to increase the power, but it looks likes the switch will make a driver swap quite difficult.

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Yes, there are traces connecting two of the emitters together on the MCPCB. There are two sets of + and - on the board. One set for the two emitters connected by a trace, and the other set for the lone emitter. The wires going across the board take the place of another set of traces to connect the third LED to the other two. Of course, this wiring method is not necessary, even with the hole in the center. It’s just how they decided to do it.

The component near where the driver PCB sticks out a little over a notch in the pill is the “switch”. It responds to the magnet moving on the outside. It looks like a transistor, but it’s a hall effect sensor. The magnet turns it on and off, and it thusly controls the driver. The driver itself is getting unbroken power through both the positive and negative side. The threads aren’t anodized either, so there’s no way to lock it out. You have to remove the cells in order to turn it off.

Edit: The hall effect “switch” is the component marked “1382” on the driver PCB.

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I got both lights today, the red from GB and the 4$ one.
I will take a look inside later and compare them.

The one from Gearbest is a lot better in everything. It pulls around 2.5A and gives around 1400lm stock, driver current was about stable so it seems to be a linear regulator… Centering discs reflector and lens are clear for a budget light. Tail threads anodized so lockout seems possible.

The 4$ one pulls 1.3A on 8V and a lot less on 7V, gives maybe 600lm. Big plastic discs ugly reflector and lens. Slider a lot harder to move and only one mode.

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I have never measured anywhere close to 1.3A using either of the two samples I've received! I'm doing good to get half that. The slider was hard to move on mine but I applied some Teflon lube to the seat and it because much smoother...

Update to the review, regarding the first of the two lights I received:

After posting the review, I noticed that if you shake the light, it would die. Re-actuating the switch would allow it to come back on normally. I had initially assumed that this was just a bad connection issue due to the laptop-pull flat-top cells I was using. The second light didn't demonstrate the same issue when used with the same cells though. After removing the head from the problematic light, I realized that there was some looseness inside the head, and the pill/reflector assembly would move slightly when shaken, causing the break in the electrical connection. I'll be tearing this one down at my earliest opportunity to see if there are any missing components or differences that would cause this unreliability. I curious if either the small-diameter GITD O-Ring or the mysterious spring clip were omitted, resulting in this issue.

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I just tried it again on a power supply, I get 1.3A at 8V.
——-

I disassembled both lights and the driver is totally different, I tried resistor modding the good driver with the different modes. It worked on the bench but I couldn’t get everything together:( the big black oring doesn’t fit on the lens anymore…I will make a pause on that and try it again tomorrow. But at least my dreams to tune the one mode light to different modes is destroyed.

The pill is not bad at all but there is a lot of space between pill and light, I used some big blobs of thermal paste here and there easyly 2-3mm thick blobs just barely touched the housing.

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That was the hardest part of reassembling the light for me; The O-ring was well lubed with a silicone-based (?) goop. I put it in place in the bevel of the lens, and then had to use a tool to press around the circumference until it recessed far enough to thread the bezel ring into place.

The other problem is the need for a tool to remove and re-tighten the bezel rings. That was a pain, and I scuffed one up pretty badly with my attempt.

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The other problem is the need for a tool to remove and re-tighten the bezel rings. That was a pain, and I scuffed one up pretty badly with my attempt.